February 9, 2016 - WASHINGTON STATE, UNITED STATES - A 2.9-magnitude earthquake hit just south of Mount St. Helens Monday morning, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The quake was recorded at 8:50 a.m.
The earthquake, according to the USGS, wasn't very strong. Only three people reported feeling it, as of 10:30 a.m.
It's the strongest earthquake in Washington in February. A 2.6-magnitude quake was reported Feb. 5 near Tacoma. - MyNorthwest.
Earthquakes that occurred before the May 1980 eruption of Mount. St. Helens may have been caused by magma being injected from one chamber to another.
Researchers said more tremors were observed in the area, which could hint of potential eruption. (Photo : Davgood Kirshot | Pixabay)
November 10, 2015 - PACIFIC NORTHWEST, UNITED STATES - The eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980 has claimed 57 lives and caused serious damage to homes and infrastructure.
Now, scientists have revealed that the volcano could possibly erupt again in the future based on findings of a pioneering $3 million study of the volcano's plumbing system.
Geologists who studied the volcano have found a second enormous chamber lying between seven to 23 miles beneath the surface.
This massive pool of molten rock was found connected to a smaller chamber lying directly beneath the volcano.
How these two chambers are connected is helping scientists understand the sequence of events prior to the 1980 eruption, whose strength of explosion destroyed the topmost peaks of the mountain.
Matching the newly discovered magma reservoirs with earthquake data also sheds light on how the deadliest eruption in U.S. history occurred.
The researchers said that the series of tremors that occurred in the months leading to the 1980 eruption may have been caused by magma pumping from the lower to the upper chamber of the volcano, which caused the pressure inside the upper chamber to dramatically increase resulting in the deadly explosion.
"We can only now understand that those earthquakes are connecting those magma reservoirs," said Rice University seismologist Eric Kiser. "They could be an indication that you have migration of fluid between the two bodies."
Reporting the findings of their study at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Baltimore, Maryland on Nov. 3, the researchers said that more tremors have been observed in the area suggesting that more magma is being injected.
"A cluster of low frequency events, typically associated with injection of magma, occurs at the northwestern boundary of this low Vp column," the researchers reported. "Much of the recorded seismicity between the shallow high Vp/Vs body and deep low Vp column took place in the months preceding and hours following the May 18, 1980 eruption. This may indicate a transient migration of magma between these two reservoirs associated with this eruption."
After the 1980 eruption, the volcano started to erupt again in 2004 but it fell silent in July 2008. Nonetheless, Mount St. Helens is still considered a high risk volcano and is closely monitored by the U.S. Geological Survey. The researchers said that their findings could offer a crucial early warning system of a potential eruption. - Tech Times.
May 21, 2015 - YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, UNITED STATES - Heavy rain and snow over the weekend has caused a rock and mud slide
across a popular Yellowstone National Park trail, forcing its closure
until further notice.
The National Park Service says one rock that crashed down on the Brink
of the Lower Falls Trail is nearly 7 feet tall and 8 feet long,
effectively blocking the trail in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.
Canyon District Ranger Tim Townsend says no work can be done to clear the trail until the unstable slope above it dries out.
Visitors may still hike the nearby North Rim Trail.
As the busy holiday weekend approaches, rangers say many trails and
other areas in Yellowstone are saturated. Current trail condition
reports are available at Yellowstone visitor's centers or backcountry
offices.
The following release was sent out by Yellowstone National Park:
Heavy rain and snow over the weekend caused a rock and mud slide across
the Brink of the Lower Falls trail, prompting rangers to close the trail
until further notice. One rock that crashed down is nearly 7 feet tall
and 8 feet long, effectively blocking the trail.
"We know this is a popular trail, and as soon as conditions dry out, we
will work to clear the trail," said Canyon District Ranger Tim Townsend.
"Right now the entire slope above the trail is still wet and unstable
making it unsafe for crews to work in the area."
Due to the wet conditions, the trail crew is evaluating the area to
determine the likelihood of more slides and the best course of action to
reopen the trail.
Visitors may still hike the North Rim Trail, but rangers ask that people
respect the closure on the Brink of the Lower Falls Trail.
As the busy holiday weekend approaches, rangers remind visitors that
many trails and other areas are saturated by recent rain and snow.
Visitors need to be aware of their surroundings and footing throughout
the park. Current trail condition reports are available at Yellowstone
visitor's centers or backcountry offices.
Plinian column from May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Aerial
view from southwest. Mount Adams is in the background (right).
Robert Krimmel photo May 18 1980
May 16, 2015 - U.S. PACIFIC NORTHWEST - Mount St. Helens caught science a little by surprise.
A volcano hadn't erupted on the United State mainland outside Alaska and
Hawaii since California's Lassen Peak in early 20th Century.
And modern science had yet to witness an eruption quite like St. Helens.
"I think this was a turning point in the way people approached these
kinds of potentially active, explosive volcanoes," said Mike Dungan, a
volcanologist with an office at the University of Oregon.
St. Helens didn't just erupt: it blew up.
The force of the May 18, 1980, eruption wasn't just vertical; it was
lateral, sending a side of the mountain rocketing down slope as a wall
of boiling mud and rock.
The eruption killed 57 people - and put scientists and policy makers on notice.
"It's only a matter of a short time - decades or something - before
another one of these things occurs," Dungan said. "A sector collapse
eruption like Mount St. Helens - it will happen again in Cascades."
Research at the University of Oregon is shedding new light on the cause of the explosion.
Geologists like PhD student Kristina Walowski are conducting research
into how ocean water seeps into offshore plates as they plunge deep into
the earth.
"What's really interesting is that water is really important because it
lowers the melting temperature of a rock and when that happens you can
create magma," she said.
Mount St. Helens viewed aerially from the northeast before the 1980
eruptive activity. Dashed line marks boundary of area removed by the May
18 blast.
"The water is really the key thing that causes the expansion, just like
when champagne comes jetting out of a bottle," said Paul Wallace,
professor geological science at UO. "It's a foamy material because of
the gas present in gas bubbles."
The May edition of Nature Geoscience published the findings by the Oregon team, funded by a National Science Foundation Grant.
"Ultimately the water that makes them so explosive is coming out of the
ocean," Wallace said. "And eventually as the plate moves like a conveyor
belt, it gets returned back down into the inside of the earth.."
WATCH: Eruption like Mount St. Helens - 'It will happen again in Cascades'.
"It's not like you're pouring cups of water into the interior of the
earth, right?" Walowski said. "There's a complicated set of reactions
and breakdowns where these rocks are changing shape, and releasing water
little by little by little."
So which of the Cascade volcanoes is next in line to erupt?
It's difficult to predict, but geologists are watching.
"We're really in the midst of a technology explosion when it comes to
monitoring volcanoes, using all kinds of things using remote sensing
instruments on satellites," Wallace said.
"Mount St. Helens is still the most frequent in the Cascades," Walowski
said, "and based on that, it may be the most likely to go again." - KVAL.
The gorgeous colors of Yellowstone’s Grand
Prismatic hot spring are among the national park’s myriad hydrothermal
features created by the Yellowstone supervolcano. A new University of
Utah study reports discovery of a huge magma reservoir beneath
Yellowstone’s previously known magma chamber. (“Windows into the Earth,”
Robert B. Smith and Lee J. Siegel)
April 23, 2015 - WYOMING, UNITED STATES - Yellowstone National Park is the home of one of the world's largest
volcanoes, one that is quiescent for the moment but is capable of
erupting with catastrophic violence at a scale never before witnessed by
human beings. In a big eruption, Yellowstone would eject 1,000 times as
much material as the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. This would be a
disaster felt on a global scale, which is why scientists are looking at
this thing closely.
On Thursday, a team from the University of
Utah published a study, in the journal Science that for the first time
offers a complete diagram of the plumbing of the Yellowstone volcanic
system.
The new report fills in a missing link of the system. It
describes a large reservoir of hot rock, mostly solid but with some
melted rock in the mix, that lies beneath a shallow, already-documented
magma chamber.
The newly discovered reservoir is 4.5 times larger than
the chamber above it. There's enough magma there to fill the Grand
Canyon. The reservoir is on top of a long plume of magma that emerges
from deep within the Earth's mantle.
WATCH: University of Utah seismologists funded by the National Science Foundation found a pool of magma beneath Yellowstone's supervolcano that they say is big enough to fill the Grand Canyon more than 11 times. (National Science Foundation/University of Utah)
This system has been in place for roughly 17 million years, with the
main change being the movement of the North American tectonic plate,
creeping at the rate of roughly an inch a year toward the southwest. A
trail of remnant calderas can be detected across Idaho, Oregon and
Nevada, looking like a string of beads, marking the migration of the
tectonic plate. A similar phenomenon is seen in the Hawaiian islands as
the Pacific plate moves over a hot spot, stringing out volcanoes, old to
new, dormant to active.
“This is like a giant conduit. It starts down at 1,000 kilometers.
It's a pipe that starts down in the Earth," said Robert Smith, emeritus
professor of geophysics at the University of Utah and a co-author of the
new paper. The lead author is his colleague Hsin-Hua Huang.
This
new picture doesn't change, fundamentally, the risk assessment of
Yellowstone, but it will help scientists understand the mechanics of the
volcano.
“Really getting an idea of how it works and understanding how these
large caldera-forming eruptions may occur, and how they might happen,
would be a good thing to understand," said paper co-author Jamie
Farrell, another geophysicist at the university. "No one's ever
witnessed one of these really large volcanic eruptions. We kind of scale
smaller eruptions up to this size and say, 'This is probably how it
happens,' but we really don’t know that for sure.”
A new study provides the first complete view of
the plumbing system that supplies hot and partly molten rock from the
Yellowstone hotspot to the Yellowstone supervolcano. The study revealed a
gigantic magma reservoir beneath the previously known magma chamber.
This cross-section illustration cutting southwest-northeast under
Yellowstone depicts the view revealed by seismic imaging. Seismologists
estimate the annual chance of a Yellowstone supervolcano eruption is 1
in 700,000. (Hsin-Hua Huang/University of Utah)
The next major, calderic eruption could be within the boundaries of the park, northeast of the old caldera.
“If
you have this crustal magma system that is beneath the pre-Cambrian
rocks, eventually if you get enough fluid in that system, enough magma,
you can create another caldera, another set of giant explosions," Smith
said. "There’s no reason to think it couldn’t continue that same process
and repeat that process to the northeast.”
The report is based on the equivalent of an MRI of the crust beneath
Yellowstone. Nature itself supplies the key diagnostic tool:
Earthquakes. The Yellowstone region is seismically active, and in any
given year there can be hundreds of small earthquakes. These tremors
send seismic waves racing through the planet's crust. Seismographs
stationed around Yellowstone and across the United States record the
arrival of these waves and carefully measure how long it took for them
to reach the instruments. The speed of the waves carries information:
When the seismic waves hit hot rock, they go slower; when they pass
through cold rock, they're faster. By combining the data from many
sensors, scientists can get a picture of the hot and cold rock beneath
Yellowstone. This is known as "seismic tomography."
This is a volcano that can erupt either in a big way or a truly colossal
and catastrophic way. The big eruptions can send lava flowing over a
big portion of the park; the really huge ones can form a giant crater,
or caldera. The last time Yellowstone had a calderic eruption was
640,000 years ago, and the misshapen hole it created was about 25 miles
by 37 miles across. This caldera has since been filled in by lava flows
and natural erosion, and Yellowstone Lake covers a portion of the area.
The main visual evidence of the old caldera is the striking absence of
mountains at the heart of the park: They were literally blown away in
the last eruption.
Risk assessment is tricky for low-probability, high-consequence
events like volcanic eruptions. The big Yellowstone eruptions occur on
time scales of many hundreds of thousands of years. Smith said the
repeat time for a caldera explosion at Yellowstone is roughly 700,000
years. But the smaller eruptions, with lava flowing over the surface,
are more frequent. There have been at least 50 such smaller eruptions
since the caldera exploded 640,000 years ago. The most recent was about
70,000 years ago.
Geological processes don't follow clocks. These
are chaotic systems, with strain building unpredictably as distant
faults break and the geological stresses shift here and there.
Bottom
line: Yellowstone is unpredictable. There's no sign at all that this
old volcano is going to erupt anytime soon, either in a big way or a
huge, show-stopper way. But neither is there any evidence that it's
running out of steam. - Washington Post.
May 01, 2014 - SEATTLE, UNITED STATES- Magma levels are slowly
rebuilding inside Mount St. Helens, a volcano in Washington state that
erupted in 1980 and killed 57 people, although there was no sign of an
impending eruption, U.S. scientists said.
Visitors to the Coldwater Ridge Center look up at Mount St. Helens venting steam October 11, 2004. REUTERS/Andy Clark
The roughly 8,300-foot volcano erupted in an explosion of hot ash and gas on May 18, 1980, spewing debris over some 230 square miles and causing more than a billion dollars in property damage. Entire forests were crushed and river systems altered in the blast, which began with a 5.2 magnitude earthquake.
"The magma reservoir beneath Mount St. Helens has been slowly re-pressurizing since 2008," the U.S. Geological Survey said in a statement on Wednesday. "It is likely that re-pressurization is caused by (the) arrival of a small amount of additional magma 4 to 8 km (2.5 to 5 miles) beneath the surface."
The USGS said this is to be expected with an active volcano and does not indicate "the volcano is likely to erupt anytime soon."
The USGS, and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network at University of Washington, closely monitor ground deformation and seismicity at the volcano. This summer, they will also measure its released gases and gravity field, measurements that can be used to monitor subsurface magma and forecast eruptions. - Yahoo.
January 30, 2014 - HAWAII - Geologists say they've confirmed the existence of a previously unknown large, deep magma chamber below Hawaii's Kilauea volcano.
Credit: USGS
The discovery offers new insight into the largely unknown internal plumbing of volcanoes, scientists at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science reported Wednesday.
The finding at the world's most active volcano is the first geophysical observation that large magma chambers exist in the deeper parts of a volcano system, they said.
The scientists analyzed seismic waves moving through the volcano to understand the internal structure of the volcanic system, finding a lava chamber at least a mile in diameter and located at a depth of 5 miles to 6.8 miles.
"It was known before that Kilauea had small, shallow magma chambers," geologists and lead study author Guoqing Lin said. "This study is the first geophysical observation that large magma chambers exist in the deep oceanic crust below."
The magma reservoir below Kilauea is similar to those widely observed beneath volcanoes located at mid-ocean ridges, the researchers said.
"Understanding these magma bodies are a high priority because of the hazard posed by the volcano," said geophysics Professor Falk Amelung, the study co-author. "Kilauea volcano produces many small earthquakes and paying particular attention to new seismic activity near this body will help us to better understand where future lava eruptions will come from." - UPI.
